Life Afterward
by AwesomeFanFictionAuthor
Summary: Dealing with life after fighting Xana. May continue, may not.
1. Chapter 1

She was a vector, direction and magnitude, and yet the direction was not clear and the magnitude fluctuated rapidly. At once nothing, listless, without any energy at all, lethargic, unmotivated...and then the feelings would come surging back as if from some foreign entity, as if it was a ballistic missile that would strike with little to no warning.

Everything was gone, it seemed. No, that wasn't quite true, she still had her friends with her. She could take comfort in that. Or at least, she was supposed to be able to. But... she didn't feel that same connection with them that she had when... when they were all fighting together. Now that it was over she felt sort of...empty. There was this pool of static deep in her mind that sometimes became so loud it blocked out the rest of reality.

She still went to class and everything, though, because what else was there to do? They...won. The threat was gone, and now they could live a normal life on Earth...a world without danger. That was the mantra she had often said to herself, a little prayer for the future of this world, of her future with Jeremie and them.

A world...without danger. Well, that had never been true, there was danger in this world, and there always would be...danger that they could do nothing about. Corruption in business and government, the planet imploding in on itself, war, poverty. But it was at least a world without Xana. and that was something they could be proud of.

But she felt so hollow.

A whole new world opened up to her, a world where she was free, free to do anything she wanted, pursue any goal. She wasn't bound to Lyoko anymore, she wasn't the girl the world depended on, the only one who could stop him, the one who needed to be protected. She was free to take risks. She was free to...actually live. It was big and bright and terrifying, a brand new day...

She hadn't left her bed all day.

Aelita turned her head from the slit in the window shades to the inside of her room. Her room was fairly messy, a small pile of garbage was accumulating on her desk, mostly bags and wrappers for snacks she'd eaten in her room when it was 3am and she realized she forgot to eat dinner. Her bra casually tossed near, but not quite in her laundry basket... she had long since given up getting up and getting dressed again. She'd been up...woken up quite early. She didn't have nightmares anymore, she didn't have any dreams at all...but she had still woken up in a cold sweat. She had been determined to get something, anything done today...but here she was...in bed...

She told herself it was some form of self-care, that she was taking some time to rest...but she felt so...empty. Would she ever stop resting? Was resting even the right move here, maybe she needed to keep moving to maybe feel something? Well, she did keep moving, she went to class, and went to lunch with the others...and she was at least pleasant with everyone, would smile and wave. It was really only when she was alone.

And she knew, logically, that she could call the others, call Yumi or Odd or Jeremie, and they would be there, but they had their own issues, their own ways of dealing with this. She didn't feel like she could add her feelings on top of theirs. Plus...even if she did reach out to them during these times, she wasn't sure what good it would do. If they knew how to help they would have already helped themselves. And that was another thing she couldn't just lay here or complain or...she couldn't while her friends were hurting.

And yet she still couldn't make herself get up. She sighed, closed her eyes, and knit her eyebrows. The image, the horrible images of that day threatened to flash behind her eyelids, but she fought it back with everything she had. Her left arm clenched in a knee-jerk response. She breathed, she needed to calm down.

The world ended with her, the family line ended with her, the war ended with her. How could she begin again?

Nobody had checked up on her. Now, it was a Sunday, so it wasn't like she was supposed to be anywhere and didn't show up. There was absolutely no way anyone could know she was hurting, because she hadn't said anything to anyone. Yet she found herself hoping that someone would come through the door and ask what was wrong. She wasn't sure what anyone would do, what anyone could do to make it better. She would eventually snap out of it...she had to. It felt like there was a film, a membrane separating herself and the rest of the world...or maybe that was all the oil and stuff accumulating on her skin, she hadn't showered in a day or two, either.

She couldn't get up, she couldn't do anything...she couldn't save him. She wasn't worth the sacrifice. She tried to think of something positive to counteract these negative thoughts, she didn't come up with anything, it was just this endless torrent of negativity washing over her, a baptism of grief.

Maybe sleeping would shut these thoughts up. She rolled over, closed her eyes, and within a few minutes, slipped into nothingness.


	2. Chapter 2

There were good times and there were bad times, highs and lows. Of course that was true, that was always true, the steady rhythm of life. Of course, her rhythm of life was disrupted, and so...the highs, there weren't many, and the lows...were intense.

And it wasn't just that, the frequency of them were shockingly fast. Her mind danced nimbly from one mood to the other to the other to the other to the other...

And it kept going, and she just wanted to rest. But if she rested, would she allow apathy to take control. And if apathy took control...where would she be...probably asleep forever, unable or unwilling to get up. And she wasn't totally sure she wouldn't be better off that way.

One thing she was good at though, and that was...keeping...going? She knew that wasn't the right way to say that phrase, but she couldn't bother to think of what the correct phrase was at the moment. Anyways, she was in class. She was still doing about just as well as she had been before Xana's death. Thankfully, Aelita had the kind of mind where the important subjects in school...she could just kind of do things on autopilot. It was the social aspect of life that she was faltering on. She was sure her friends noticed...

They were all dealing with their own reactions to not having to fight Xana anymore, and the aftermath of the final battle. She wasn't really ready to confront her feelings about her father, yet...her mind would turn to that topic and suddenly become a mess of sound and fury, buzzing and roaring and everything... Anyways...the others were dealing with their own problems. They had been through something traumatic together for years. They had been at war. And now, it was done. Nobody knew what to do.

And...while she wanted to believe that she was there to help the others, and the others were there to help her, but they couldn't help each other when they were all so engulfed in their own issues.

She was sitting next to Jeremie, but he wasn't paying any attention to her, or to Mrs. Hertz. He was scribbling something down, Aelita couldn't be sure what it was, but he was probably writing down his feelings, like a diary sort of thing. He had stopped keeping a video diary ever since they turned the Supercomputer off. In fact, he wasn't using as much technology overall, since then. Maybe he was sick of computers. She couldn't blame him. That didn't make him any less of a shut in, though. He just shut himself out with books more than his computer, now.

She wished he wouldn't. She could really use his companionship right now. Well...at least he was getting the chance to read, now. Jeremie hadn't had time to do much of anything for the past two years. He was too busy desperately trying to figure out impossible solutions to problems that were way over his head. And he couldn't do it all alone, and some of it was luck, and some of it seemed like...divine intervention, but without him...the Earth would have been forfeit a long time ago, or she would have been dead, or both.

And so she owed him everything, although he didn't hold that over her head.

She tended to make small drawings instead of writing about her thoughts and feelings, and they tended to be this sort of biotech morbid looking stuff...or at least, it was her best approximation of that. She wasn't terribly great at drawing.

The bell rung, and they walked their zombie walk into the rest of the world.


End file.
